18 Introduction

At this point you have learned how to read in data, manipulate it to get just the parts you want or to aggregate it to the level you want, and visualize it through maps or graphs. You’ve done so using data sets that are commonly used in criminological research.

In the next several chapters we will be introducing a number of other data sets - or looking deeper into data we’ve already seen - that are common in criminology. While these chapters do use R a bit to explore or read in the data, they are primarily a discussion of the trade-offs of using each data set. Some of the data sets are difficult to read into R, requiring more steps than you may be useful, so these chapters will also discuss how to get that data into R.